have hindered preparation. The Na- tional Weather Service's Floyd forecast provoked the largest evacuation in American history, and it turned out that very few of the people who left their homes needed to go. Almost all the expensive beach houses that you saw on television were unharmed; it was the farmers inland who were wiped out by the flooding that followed the storm, and most people weren't prepared for that. The N.W.S. forecast-made by gov- ernment forecasters working in the much photographed National Hurri- cane Center, in Miami-declared that an extremely severe storm would slam into Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night. So advised, I flew to Charleston on Tuesday to join a Weather Channel crew waiting for Floyd. My flight was full of nervous property own- ers and media people. A man behind me said he lived in Boston and had a week- end house on Folly Beach; he was flying down to board it up. "I always wanted a placé on the beach, so I figured why not," he said. "But this is sca.rr" As the plane descended toward Charleston, I looked down at Inter- state 26 and saw the largest traffic jam I have ever witnessed; even from five hundred feet the cars stretched as far as I could see to the red horizon. (The local paper later reported that it took people fifteen hours to go sixty miles.) The old motto of Charleston, "Come hell or high water," seemed to have yielded to a new motto: "If the Weather Channel " says go, go. Heading toward Foll I had the east- bound side of the Interstate pretty much to myself A religious program was on the radio; a caller was explaining that God could not be in the storm, because in the Bible Jesus condemns the storm, and he wouldn't do that if his own Fa- ther was in it, would he? This was inter- rupted by a news conference in which Governor Jim Hodges was upgrading the voluntary evacuation order to a mandatory order for all residents along the Intracoastal Waterwar All the hotels and stores in Charleston were closing, and by the time I arrived at the Folly Hohday Inn, where the Weather Chan- nel crew was filming, it had nearly shut down. I stood on Folly Beach and looked 46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 3, 2000 down the beautiful curve of sand with those expensive homes built cheek by jowl along it-the stacked chips of twenty fat years in the American econ- om combined with a quiet period in major Atlantic hurricanes that now seemed to be coming to an end. I wan- dered a couple of streets back from the beach, into a funky-looking conve- nience store, called Bert's, that hadn't yet closed, and I loaded up on supplies, buy- ing items I hadn't bought since I was a kid-Pop- Tarts, Nilla wafers, Hawai- ian Punch. Most of the customers were surfers, who had come out for the waves. The checkout girl was looking up at the TV as she absent-mindedly bagged my purchases, and saying to no one in par- ticular that she ought to get out to the beach to be interviewed by that dude from the Weather Channel. Jeff Morrow, one of the channel's on- camera meteorologists, was at Folly Pier getting ready to do a live shot. (At the Weather Channel, a forecaster is called an O.C.M., although Morrow refers to himself as "the talent.") A freelance cameraman-wearing black jeans, no shoes, and a wild-man look you some- times see in cameramen-was framing the shot in a digital Betacam. A second cameraman was out filming people getting ready for the hurricane: load- ing up on plywood, for instance, at the Home Depot, a major Weather Chan- nel advertiser. Morrow had a winning lack of cyni- cism about his job in the media. Because O.C.M.s cover bad weather, which is supposedly nobody's fault, they seem to be able to maintain a youthful enthusi- asm. (Every single O.C.M. I met traced an interest in the weather back to child- hood.) They also get an enthusiastic re- ception out in the field. "These Weather Channel guys are treated like frigging royalty;" I was told by Bruce Fauzer, a satellite-truck operator who was work- (1).. ing with Morrow on Floyd. "Usually, local people treat the media like scum- vultures preying on a disaster. But local people love these Weather Channel guys. When we were in North Carolina for Dennis"-the hurricane that had threatened the East Coast a week ear- lier-"people were coming to the truck with plates of ribs, cold drinks, pie, you name it. It was amazing." In between updates from Morrow, the Weather Channel was broadcasting the National Weather Service's data. During storms, the Weather Channel gives much play to its tropical-storm experts-they include Dr. Steve Lyons and John Hope, the eighty-year-old Cronkite-style co-anchor of the Severe Weather Update desk. But, as far as severe-weather warnings go, the Weather Channel broadcasts only the National Weather Service's bulletin. (In times of an emergency, such as a hurricane, the N.W.S.'s forecast is supposed to be trans- mitted by all weather broadcasters.) Even if a staff meteorologist disagrees with that forecast, the channel will not break rank with the N.W.S., a practice the Weather Channel's vice-president, Ray Ban, chalks up to the importance of "being on the same page, weatherwise." The National Weather Service's fore- cast was based in part on a computer model running on a Cray T-90 super- computer at the Geophysical Fluid Dy- namics Laboratory, in Princeton. An- other computer model, which is used by the European Center for Medium- Range Weather Forecasts, in London, was beginning to spit out a different forecast for Floyd, showing the storm weakening and turning north, and even- tually making landfall near Wilming- ton, North Carolina, between fifty and seventy-five miles farther east than the N.W.S.'s predicted track of the storm in the eighteen to twenty-four hours pre- ceding its arrival. The European forecast would prove correct, and by Tuesday night Accu Weather-which for the past thirty-eight years has sold forecasts to newspapers and TV and radio stations- had started to use that forecast, which its clients passeçl along to local markets. Elliot Abrams said that the same com- puter model had worked well with Hur- ricane Dennis, and "when a model has a hot hand you stay with it." But Weather Channel viewers weren't aware of the